The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  Gwenny called his name once: ‘Tom!’ There was a scuffle and the sound of men crashing through the ponic tangle above him. The pigs took fright at once and darted away to safety. Brandyholm was already blundering swiftly back up Sternstairs.

  As he reached the spot where he had left his woman, an arrow twanged angrily past his shoulder. He dropped to his face in a fury. The Forwards had struck again. It was useless to try and pursue them down the corridors; he would be impaled as soon as he came up to them.

  Immediately, impotent rage boiled up in Brandyholm. It was spiced with fear, fear of what the Lieutenant would say when he learnt the tribe had lost another female to the enemy, but Brandyholm let it wash through him almost with pleasure. He thrashed on the ground, kicking and tearing at the earth, his face distorted.

  At last this state of mindlessness left him. Weak and abandoned, he lay in a shallow ditch he had worked round him. As he breathed less rapidly, his face regained its normal pallor. Idly, he rubbed at the hard ridges under him; their existence dawning on him, he knelt up and studied them. Regularly spaced ledges of metal … no reason existed to doubt that they ran from top to bottom of the great incline of Sternstairs, covered by the needly humus formed of countless dead ponic leaves.

  ‘More fuel for the ship theory,’ he muttered, sullenly kicking the soil level again; little he cared one way or the other for the ship theory. Shouldering his dazer, he turned back to Quarters to make his humiliating report. The ponic seeds clicked like beads as he roughly parted their slender stems and barged his way home.

  Once Brandyholm was past the barricades, it was only a short while before he stood in front of the aged Lieutenant. The latter, guard-flanked, concealed his eyes carefully beneath bushy white eyebrows.

  ‘Expansion to your ego, sir,’ Brandyholm said humbly.

  ‘At your expense,’ came the stock response, and then Lieutenant Greene asked sternly, ‘Why are you back in Quarters at this time, hunter?’

  Brandyholm explained how his woman had been taken. As he listened, the Lieutenant’s nostrils filled with mucus, his mouth slowly elongated and overflowed with saliva until his chin glistened. At the same time, his eyes widened and his frame began to shake violently. Through his fear, Brandyholm had to admit it was a splendid, daunting performance.

  Its climax came when the Lieutenant fell to the floor and lay limp. Two guards, faces twitching, stood protectively over his body.

  ‘He’ll kill himself doing that, one day soon,’ Brandyholm thought, but it gave him little reassurance for the present.

  At length the Lieutenant climbed slowly to his feet, his rage dispersed, and said as he brushed his clothes down, ‘This woman, Gwenny Tod – did she not bear you a child?’

  ‘Many periods ago, sir. It was a girl child and died of crying soon after it was born. She is little use as a child-bearer.’

  ‘She is another woman lost to the Forwards,’ said Lieutenant Greene sharply. ‘We have not so many people here that we can afford to give them away, fertile or not.’

  ‘I didn’t give – ’

  ‘You should have been more alert. You should have known they were trailing. Six lashes before sleep!’

  The sentence was duly administered under the angry eyes of most of the Greene tribe. Back paining, but mind greatly eased by its degradation, Brandyholm slouched back to his room. There, Carappa the Priest awaited him, sitting patiently on his haunches with his big belly dangling. He rarely called at this late hour, and Brandyholm stood stiffly before him, waiting for him to speak first.

  ‘Expansion to your ego, son.’

  ‘At your expense, father.’

  ‘And turmoil in my id,’ capped the priest piously, making the customary genuflection of rage, without however troubling to rise.

  Brandyholm sat down on his bunk and cautiously removed the shirt from his bloody back. It took him a long time. When it was off, he flung it on the floor and spat at it, missing. He said nothing.

  ‘Your sentence was an unfair one?’ the priest asked.

  ‘Eminently,’ Brandyholm said with surly satisfaction. ‘Crooner received twice as many strokes yesterday for a much more trivial matter – working too slowly in the gardens.’

  ‘Crooner is always slow,’ said the priest absently.

  The other made no reply. Outside his room, the bright expanse of Quarters was deserted; it was sleep, all but the guards were in bed. And beyond the barricades, beyond the ponic tangle, Gwenny was in bed … somebody else’s bed.

  Carappa came over to him, leaning heavily against the bunk.

  ‘You are bitter, son?’

  ‘Very bitter, father. I feel I would like to kill somebody.’

  ‘You shall. You shall. It is good you should feel so. Never grow resigned, my son; that way is death for us all.’

  Brandyholm glanced in the priest’s direction, and saw with horror that Carappa’s eyes were seeking his. The strongest tabu in their society was directed against one man looking another straight in the eyes; honest and well-intentioned men gave each other only side glances. A priest especially should have observed this rule. He shrank back on the bed when Carappa gripped his shoulder.

  ‘Do you ever feel like running amok, Tom?’

  Brandyholm’s heart beat uncomfortably at the question. Several of the best and most savage men of Quarters had run amok, bursting through the village with their dazers burning, and afterwards living like solitary man-eaters in the unexplored areas of ponic tangle, afraid to return and face their punishment. He knew it was a manly, even an admirable thing to do; but it was not a priest’s business to incite it. A priest should unite, not disrupt his village, by bringing the frustration in men’s minds to the surface, where it could flow freely without curdling into neurosis.

  ‘Look at me, Tom. Answer me.’

  ‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ he asked, with his face to the wall.

  ‘I want to know what you are made of.’

  You know what the litany teaches us, father. We are the sons of cowards and our days are passed in fear.’

  ‘You believe that, Tom?’

  ‘Naturally. It is the Teaching.’

  ‘Then would you follow me where I led you – even out of Quarters, into Dead Ways?’

  He was silent, wondering, thinking not with his brain but with the uneasy corpuscles of his blood.

  ‘That would require courage,’ he replied at last.

  The priest slapped his great thighs and yawned enthusiastically. ‘No, Tom, you lie, true to the liars that begot you. We should be fleeing from Quarters – escaping, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. It would be a back-to-nature act, a fruitless attempt to return to the ancestral womb. It would be the very depth and abysm of cowardice to leave here. Now will you come with me?’

  Some meaning beyond the words lit a spark in Brandyholm. Had there not always been a lurking something he could not name, something from which he cried to escape? He raised himself on one elbow.

  ‘Just us two?’

  ‘No! We are too timid to go on our own,’ roared the priest heartily. ‘Crooner and Wantage are also coming. It is all planned! I wanted only a hunter like you to join us.’

  ‘Crooner is slow, you said so yourself,’ Brandyholm complained, his heart sinking now he was committed.

  ‘But he is big. Come! We can leave now.’

  ‘During this sleep?’

  ‘But of course. We must skulk out unseen. If you will come, I promise – what I promise you I cannot tell. Power … Chiefly power, my son …’

  It was a well-worn precept to be rash, not to think ahead, to act on the spur of the moment. Doing otherwise meant inertia, degenerating into the brooding state of inaction which constantly threatened to overwhelm them all. Brandyholm seized up a fresh shirt, his antique jacket and his pack, and followed the bulky figure of the priest out of the door.

  Crooner and Wantage were rounded up. Neither of them had women at present. They gave Bran
dyholm reassuringly guarded looks and fell in beside Carappa. Their features were uniformly sullen; only the priest’s meaty-chops betrayed anything like excitement.

  ‘Tomorrow’s sleep will be dim. Would it not have been safer to have waited till then?’ asked Wantage complainingly. He had pale hair to match his face, and a long jaw; he could look as cruel as anybody in Quarters. As a child he had been known to the other children as Rockface.

  ‘We might all be dead at the end of another sleep-wake,’ the priest said in reply.

  ‘True,’ Wantage admitted grudgingly. The Teaching taught that antagonism was a man’s best armour against oblivion; Wantage was commonly reckoned to be a natural survivor-type.

  One sleep-wake in every four was almost totally dark. Universally, lighting dipped to dimness; nobody in Quarters could explain why – it was just a natural phenomenon in their lives – although some philosophical spirits used it to reinforce the ship theory.

  Carappa led them away from the barricades to a solid metal bulkhead at the far end of Second Corridor. A guard stood there relaxed but alert. As the four approached, he raised his dazer, calling out the usual challenge: ‘I should be glad to fire!’

  ‘And I to die!’ responded Carappa amiably. ‘Put your weapon down, Zwemmer. No blood for you tonight. Would you shoot me, the instrument of your doubtful sanity?’

  ‘I’d shoot anybody,’ the guard said ferociously.

  ‘Well, save it for a better target. I have something important to show you.’ During this interchange, Carappa had never faltered in his advance. The guard, Zwemmer, hesitated uncertainly; other guards were within call, but a false alarm might mean lashes for him and he was anxious to preserve his present state of misery. In those few seconds of hesitation, the priest was up to him. Drawing a knife swiftly from under his short robe, Carappa sunk it deep into the other’s stomach, twisted it, and caught the body neatly over his shoulder as it doubled forward.

  ‘That was smartly done, father,’ Wantage exclaimed, respect in his voice. It was good to see a priest who so ably practised what he preached.

  ‘A pleasure,’ the priest grunted, wiping his knife. He passed his burden to Crooner who, being five foot eight and a head higher than the others, could manage it more easily. A metal grill stood in the wall before them. Carappa produced a pair of metal cutters from a capacious pocket, snicked at a connection, and calmly slid the grill back into the wall. A plain sheet of metal was now revealed; Carappa pressed a button on it and it also rolled back.

  The others jumped away involuntarily. A dark, gaping hole stood before them.

  ‘Fear not, fearful ones,’ Carappa said. ‘It’s only a man-made shaft. A carriage of some sort once ran up and down it. Pitch the guard down there for a start, Crooner.’

  The body was hurled into the gap and they listened with some satisfaction to a heavy thud a moment later.

  ‘Now follow me. We follow Zwemmer, but at a less furious speed.’

  Cables hung in the middle of the opening. Carappa seized them and climbed down fifteen feet to the next level. The lift shaft yawning below him, he swung himself onto a narrow ledge and manipulated the double gates open. One by one, the others followed him into a rustling twilight. The ponic tangle grew here as everywhere. Carappa closed the gates neatly behind them and then faced forwards, squaring his shoulders and adjusting his robe.

  ‘Great discoveries are before us, friends!’ he announced, adding, ‘So first let us sleep to be fresh to meet them.’

  ‘If we sleep here, will the tribe not come and find us?’ Crooner asked slowly.

  Wantage caught him smartly across the face with the back of his hand. The blow opened Crooner’s lower lip and sent a slow line of blood coursing down his chin. He stood there mutely, working his mouth and swinging his fists in a dull anger.

  ‘That’s for questioning the priest’s leadership,’ Wantage said. ‘You must know they will not waste a search party on us. Dreams tell us ourselves.’

  ‘And a blow may forestall murder.’ Crooner growled the prescribed answer of the formula for avoiding a duel.

  They settled down where they were, eating frugally and saying little. The priest promised to tell them his plans tomorrow. Round them as they slept were the changeless, draughtless heat and the unending rustle of the ponics. Their lean stems were the last things Brandyholm saw before he closed his eyes; so rapidly did they grow, the young ones would be feet taller and the old ones dead by the time he woke. He failed to see in this frenetic jostling a parallel with the human lives about him.

  II

  Despite his swollen lip, Bob Crooner was cheerful enough to whistle when they got up. Carappa seemed in a mood of pleasurable grimness; doubtless he gained satisfaction from knowing the others waited for what he had to say. Brandyholm and Wantage preserved their usual dour silence; the world affronted them, and they had sense enough to show it.

  Nourishment was their first and hasty consideration. Neat slashes at the joints of two young ponic poles produced enough of the gooey white miltex for their requirements. It could be assimilated raw, and they munched it down quickly.

  ‘You believe the ship theory?’ Carappa suddenly challenged Wantage.

  ‘Yes. I’ll fight the man who says I’m wrong.’

  The priest nodded his question at Crooner.

  ‘No. How can it be right?’ Crooner said.

  The priest nodded his question at Brandyholm.

  ‘I don’t know. What does it matter either way to us?’

  ‘Fool!’ the priest said. ‘It matters in a million ways.’ He picked vigorously at a decaying tooth. ‘I, of course, am interested only in the theological aspects of this question. If this is a ship, it has come from somewhere and will arrive somewhere. If this is not a ship, I can only presume we are figments of the unconscious of some singularly beastly creature.’

  They looked at him in alarm. He sneered into their faces and continued, ‘Fortunately, there can be little rational doubt that this is a ship – which brings up the question: Why should there be a conspiracy to keep us in ignorance of the fact?’

  ‘Something’s gone wrong somewhere,’ Wantage suggested eagerly. ‘That’s what I always say: something’s terribly wrong.’

  ‘Well, cease to say it in my presence,’ said Carappa smoothly. ‘There is a more likely explanation: that the driver or captain of this ship is a madman punishing us for some wrong our fore-fathers committed.’

  ‘Punishing us for a wrong,’ echoed Brandyholm, in whom the words struck a familiar chord. ‘Yes, that is why we are suffering. You make me believe the theory, father, for we all sin.’

  ‘Now this is my plan, and unfortunately I need your aid,’ continued Carappa, ignoring Brandyholm. ‘We are going to find out this captain, hunt him down. He is concealed somewhere behind a locked door. When we get to him and kill him, we – we will be in control of the ship!’

  ‘And where shall we go to with it?’ asked Crooner.

  For a moment the priest looked blank. ‘We’ll find somewhere,’ he said confidently. ‘Leave that to me.’

  He stood up and with a flourish pulled a book from his pocket. He thrust the title under their eyes, but they could hardly read; a few syllables were intelligible, but they were unable to decipher unaccustomed words. Carappa explained condescendingly to them that it was called Manual of Electrical Circuits of Starship. Until two days ago it had reposed in a trunk among other official and unused regalia of the Lieutenancy; happening upon it, the priest had appropriated it. Now it would show them the way they had to go; they were in the rear of the ship and must proceed to the front, to a spot in the nose marked ‘Control’ in the manual.

  Feeling rather dazed by this entire concept, Brandyholm muttered, ‘Then we venture into Forwards territory.’

  ‘Expecting to find Gwenny again?’ Wantage asked laughingly.

  ‘No, not expecting to see anyone again, if we get among them, Rockface,’ Brandyholm said, using the other’s childhood nickn
ame without consciously feeling the urge to irritate him. Wantage flared up almost automatically in response.

  ‘I don’t suppose Forwards are as terrible as we make them out to be,’ Crooner interrupted mildly.

  ‘Of course they aren’t,’ the priest agreed. ‘They are feared because they are unknown. That’s how superstitions are born, through ignorance. That’s how men go mad. That’s how the idea of being in a ship grows strange to us. Deep down in a man’s mind lurks elemental evil; if he forgets about it or does not acknowledge it, it swallows his knowledge and his sense. That is why so many of us become mad – ’

  ‘Cut the cackle, priest, and let’s move if we must,’ Wantage interrupted. He had no real desire to go on, his desire was merely to interrupt. The hatred of others had constantly to be expressed if a man was to stay healthy: that was a basic tenet of the Teaching. What was more difficult was to express one’s hatred of oneself.

  Their progress was slow. The ponics grew thickly. It was difficult to keep moving straight; once or twice they worked themselves into rooms and were finally confronted with black walls. Gradually, spilt miltex covered their bodies, adhered and hardened. At one stage, after their mid-wake snack, the growths mercifully thinned, and they found themselves in a clear corridor with a bend just ahead.

  With a whoop of pleasure, Brandyholm bounced round the corner, and then stopped abruptly. A man was just sliding silently down a rope into a wide gash in the floor in front. Dropping onto hands and knees, Brandyholm peered down into a vast room full of partitions with metal frames in. There was no sign of the man: he had already merged into twilight.

  A short council was held, after which they went on, carefully skirting the hole. A few yards further on, another hole stopped them, and this one was unbridgeable. An explosion from below had ripped out floor, one wall and bulkhead. The edges of the torn metal were smooth, as if great heat had melted what it sundered. The lighting had also been disrupted.

  They looked at each other uncertainly, quick to feel nonplussed.

  ‘We can’t jump across this gap,’ the priest said. ‘We must push through this hole in the wall and get back onto the corridor as soon as possible.’